I recently joined the Triptease Customer Love team and have been spending my first month speaking to hoteliers about the challenges they face: from testing new products like ours to industry issues like how they can work on personalising their booking journey.

It was with great interest then that I tuned into EyeforTravel’s webinar last week: How to go from Revenue Management to Revenue Strategy. When asked about the biggest challenge facing revenue managers, Sara Destruel, Director of Revenue Management at Pestana Hotels & Resorts and Marco Benvenuti, Chief Product Officer at Duetto both agreed that hoteliers need to be ready for mobile. It’s not just about having an optimised website to rank higher in search after Google’s Mobilegeddon, it’s also about fine tuning revenue management and strategy so mobile bookers are shown the right prices and the right time to want to book direct.

Here are three ways I think hoteliers can get it right on mobile:

Open up pricing

Marco from Duetto argued that people don’t care where the money goes – they just want to make sure they’re paying the right price. Being dynamic means looking at real time information and making sure you have the best price on your mobile channel based on that user journey. I strongly agree with his argument about how pricing is displayed: put the customer first and think about how they’d want to see the price.

Collaboration is key

Sara from Pestana Hotels argued that clear communication is the most important factor in getting revenue managers and marketers to collaborate. Marketers know how their audience is working on mobile and must find a way to clearly explain this to revenue managers, who in return must calculate the best price to offer. It’s a balancing act but getting it right can yield massive rewards, especially given hotels.com has announced a jump in overall UK mobile app bookings by 120% over the past year.

Testing. Testing.

The only way to get mobile right is to test. We encourage our clients both large and small to work out what works best for their guests and it was reassuring to hear the view being shared by the webinar hosts. We need to look beyond conversion data. Hotels will be able to improve by looking at browsing behaviour for specific dates, room types and upgrade options and the extra time spent collecting this data will pay off in the form of better revenue strategy decisions.

Thanks to EyeforTravel for hosting an informative webinar. Want to find out what more guests want when booking a hotel? Download our Get a Room ebook.